Marion Ross Returns: Next on TVC

Actress and author Marion Ross and Loyola Law School professor and former cable TV news analyst Stanley A. Goldman will join us on the next edition of TV CONFIDENTIAL, airing Feb. 22-24 at the following times and venues:

Calendar year 2019 marks the 45th anniversary of Happy Days, the beloved sitcom created and produced by Garry Marshall that made Marion Ross a household name as “Mrs. C,” the anchor of the Cunningham family, and the one that held everyone together—including, and especially, The Fonz. Marion’s first love, however, has always been the stage. She not only won critical acclaim for her Broadway and national tour (with Jean Stapleton, Larry Storch and Jonathan Frid) in Arsenic and Old Lace and the national tour of Steel Magnolias, she played the grandmother in Lost in Yonkers in Toronto and, in 2013, The Games Afoot at The New Theatre in Kansas City.

We’ll ask Marion to share a few memories of her years on Happy Days, but we’ll also ask her about playing Sophie Berger on Brooklyn Bridge (a show for which she received two Emmy nominations), as well as some of her other roles in film and television, including Operation: Petticoat, Airport and Perry Mason. Marion Ross will join us in our second hour.

Marion’s memoir, My Days: Happy and Otherwise, is a remarkable story about how a young girl from Albert Lea, Minnesota dreamed at a young age that she would be an actress—and how Marion set about making that dream come true, never losing sight of that goal, despite facing real life challenges as a dysfunctional marriage, dealing with the effects of her first husband’s alcoholism, going through the pain of divorce, overcoming financial struggles and raising two children on her own as a working mom. My Days: Happy and Otherwise also includes a foreword by Ron Howard, as well as great stories about Marion’s work alongside Lauren Bacall, Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable, Tony Curtis and her idol, Noel Coward, plus memories from her Happy Days cast mates—including the very last interviews ever given by Garry Marshall and Erin Moran.

Marion Ross is also scheduled to appear at the annual Beverly Hills Theatre Guild luncheon, which will take place on Sunday, Mar. 17 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. The theme of this year’s luncheon will be “The Hollywood Renaissance,” while the highlight of the program will be a tribute to the films and television series of Garry Marshall. Proceeds from the luncheon will help the Beverly Hills Theatre Guild fund their annual national playwriting competitions. For more information, call (310) 765-1605 or go to BeverlyHillsTheatreGuild.com

Also this week: We will welcome Stanley A. Goldman, Loyola Law School professor and a longtime television and radio legal analyst for such national media outlets as CBS radio, CNBC, and the Fox News Channel. Also the founding director of the Loyola Center for the Study of Law and Genocide, Stain is the son of a Holocaust survivor named Malka Repstein. In 2006, seven years after the death of his mother, Stan traveled to Israel to visit a woman, Genya, who was Malka’s best friend during the Holocaust. During that visit, Genya’s daughter, Dvora, showed Stan a pamphlet that she had obtained from the Israeli Holocaust Museum that documented activities between a German Jew named Norbert Masur and Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, for the release of about a thousand Jewish women from the concentration camp at Ravensbruck. The story of those negotiations had not been widely known up to that point.

While looking at that pamphlet, Stan and Dvora stumbled onto a photograph of two of the women who were released from the camp. Not only did the two women in that photograph turn out to be Stan’s and Dvora’s mothers, but the photograph spurred led Stan on a path to unravel the mystery of his mother’s release. In the course of solving that mystery, Stan discovered that the negotiations that ended up sparing his mother’s life also played a role in the demise of Adolf Hitler. It is a remarkable story that is all now captured in a new book, Left to the Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Bargain That Broke Adolf Hitler and Saved My Mother. Stanley A. Goldman will join us in our first hour.

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